To design a festival for your covenant, a tribunal or the entire order, answer the following questions. Shuffle the order of them if you like.

• Which community celebrates this holiday?
• What work ceases or continues?
• Where does the community gather to celebrate?
• What actions do they perform as part of their celebration? These can be as a serious as sacrifice, or as trivial as cheeserolling.
• What is the celebratory food of this festival? Most festivals have special dishes, based on the seasonality of medieval food.
• What lead to the foundation of this festival? Many festivals are commemorating a historical event, a story believed historical, a religious miracle or the phases of agricultural processes.
• How does the festival build the sense of cohesion in the community?
• Are there traditional gifts or greetings for the festival?
• What makes it entertaining? Boring festivals develop fringe events that eventually overtake their parent.
• Do tourists / pilgrims travel to attend the celebration?
• What side business is performed at the festival?
• How often does the festival occur? Annual is popular, but magical numbers of years or irregular, natural events may change the cycle.

Examples

Burning the Spider

The Burning of the Spider is an annual commemoration of the Battle of the False Sun, in which a powerful, early rival of the Order was destroyed in the Stonehenge Tribunal. It is celebrated across the Order, but more fervently in the Stonehenge, Loch Leagan and Norman tribunals.

Each covenant celebrates on their own, by building a pyre in a convenient field, or on a rocky outcrop. Each community makes a spider figure, out of old rope, hay and cloth rags, then incinerate it after sundown. Traditionally people drink mead at this ceremony. Music and dancing are also common.

The Gourmand Society

This began as a fringe event during the Normandy Tournament, and is still held slightly before that event. Related festivals are also held before tribunal meetings in other places. Each of the hosts creates an animal using magic, which is inspected by the other members, then butchered and cooked. There is always at least one odd creature presented for digestion, like an elephant, a walrus or a dragon.

Initially the point of the ceremony was to allow Animal specialists to study new creatures, and the slaughtering was just something the servants did, but a Jerbiton magus took that part of it over to hold a dinner party. Due to this change, a tradition has arisen that the servants of the magi may attend the fest, if separated from their masters by a screen, and have the following day off.

Participants wish each other good appetite, sometimes by letter, weeks in advance, while they work out who will create which creature. The hosts often give eating utensils or festive hats to the participants: knives are oddly popular. Although members don’t discuss other business during the feast itself, the flurry of correspondence in advance is often used to work through commercial issues, so that goods can be transfered when the magi gather.

Polishing The Serpent

Here’s a local example from one of my early campaigns. A sea serpent attacked the covenant at Tintagel in Cornwall, and the magi dispatched it, while it was wound about their castle. It started to rot and stink, so they flensed its bones, and left them, carefully articulated, about the covenant walls. Each year, the people of the covenant polish the bones, have a feast along its rib cage, and fling apples through the orbits of its skull. Its considered daring and lucky to be the one who polishes the fangs, because they are said, wrongly, to be venomous.

The right to polish the fangs is given to the grog who has shown the greatest prowess during the year, but toward the end of the covenant’s life this changed, so venerable grogs retiring from service were given the duty. Grogs who polished the teeth often mark their shields with white teardrop shapes. Ragoneda, the osteomancer who maintains the skeleton (and can make it animate, in the Autumn of the covenant) later gives these men daggers, which are made of serrated walrus ivory made as hard as steel.  Technically there are four fangs, but the polishing is generally not split between people. It’s said that if two people each polish an upper fang, they are tied by destiny, in good and bad ways.

 

Photo by be creator on Foter.com / CC BY